The Well-Made Play

Many of the plays from Ibsen’s early and middle periods, including A Doll’s House, follow
the conventions of the “well-made play.” This was a term used by the influential French
playwright Eugène Scribe (1791-1861) to describe a play with the following elements:
• A very tight plot that typically revolves around a missing element—
letters, a lost or stolen document, an absent person.
• Subplots that are related to the missing element and add tension to the work.
These subplots do not have to be substantial, and they often involve revelation of
information, that is, who knows what at any given time in the story.
• A climax or scene of revelation, in which the missing element is revealed.
This scene often saves the hero of the play from ruin or embarrassment.
• A dénouement, or closing scene, in which explanations are supplied to resolve all
the earlier questions or mysteries in the play. This scene, according to Scribe, is to follow
very soon after the climax. In French, the word dénouement means “untying,” so the term
suggests unraveling all the knotted conditions or circumstances on which the initial
problems— and the plot—were based.

After Scribe’s death, his ideas continued to be highly influential. Gustav Freytag, a German
critic, developed an illustration in the form of a triangle to describe the elements in Scribe’s
well-made play. Freytag’s pyramid was designed with the
five-act play in mind, and it includes the following elements:
• The pyramid itself is in the form of an equilateral triangle; the left leg is the
inciting moment, the standing point is the climax, and the right leg represents the last
suspense, the point at which the dénouement begins.
• The left leg of the pyramid is built on the inciting moment, that is, the incident
that begins the real movement of the play. This is not necessarily the first incident of a play
(such as the opening of a door or the introduction of the early characters). Instead, it will be
the first incident that introduces elements of conflict, passion, or mystery.
• A line from the inciting moment to the climax encompasses all the rising
action, that is, all the incidents that add either exposition or complication to the
plot. In this sense, exposition is additional information, as when the reader learns that
Nora has borrowed a significant amount of money without her husband’s knowledge.
Complication ensues when a character or incident makes the action more urgent or
more delicate; for example, the introduction of Krogstad is a complication.
• The climax is the crisis-point of the play—the moment of revelation toward
which the rising action has been moving.
• After the climax, incidents are considered falling action, as they fall away
from the high point along a line from the climax to the moment of last suspense.
However, life is untidy, and additional crises can arise, so the falling action can include
reversals and even a catastrophe.
• While Freytag’s pyramid shows the moment of last suspense as the end of the play,
Scribe used the term dénouement to point out that explanations often follow the last bit of
suspense in a play. Other critics use the term resolution for the closing action ofthe play,
in which the
conflict is resolved for good or ill. Interestingly, however, as Ibsen’s work matured in
the middle period, he began to experiment with form as well as subject. While he tackled
the traditional social structures of his day,Ibsen also showed increasing independence
from the established form of the “well-made play.” A Doll’s House has several elements
of the “well-made play,” but it also departs from this model in important respects. Chief
 among these is the closing structure of the play. In terms of the “well- made
play,” the climax, which is the revelation of Nora’s fraud in obtaining a loan and
Helmer’s reaction to that news, would be followed by the expected ending of Nora’s
submission to Helmer. However, the play has a longer dénouement, with an ending that
shocked audiences in Ibsen’s day. The nontraditional resolution is Nora’s startling decision
to leave husband and home in order to find herself.